Leeza’s Story

My name is Leeza Jessie. I am a Woman, a Mother, and an Interdisciplinary Artist of the Creative Arts.

Presently, I live in Bristol, England, and grew up in West Cork, Southern Ireland, until I was twenty-one when I ‘flew the nest’ with my one-year-old daughter and a traveling musical band of other beautiful humans set to seek our fortune in the big wide world.

As is the way sometimes, life seemed to appear to not go to plan, and before long, I had moved to London to engage in a three-year degree program in the Performing Arts, specializing in Dance. It was here that I first came across Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), a dance form that did not focus on the external, the emphasis not being on technique or how I looked on the outside, but a space and time to allow an unfolding of engagement with my internal landscapes and their relationship to each other.

I fell in love with the ‘inside’ and how this then informed the ‘outside.’ Fast track roughly ten years forward and I’m walking on a windy Summers day by a river in Bristol when I receive a phone call from my Aunty Jane Virginia inviting me to Northumberland to join Fred and Colleen Sugerman in a Medicine Dance Immersion entitled Power of the Witness. We must have spent at least two hours on the phone as Jane generously shared with me her understanding and experience of Medicine Dance.

I went….

Again and again and again

And continue to…

Towards the end of 2016 and for the next three and a half years I facilitated a Medicine Dance inspired class entitled Freedom In Motion.

In 2022 I resumed an ongoing weekly class and with Fred’s permission I now call my offering Medicine Dance.

On the 19th and 20th of July Medicine Dance has been included in the Buddhafield Festival 2024 programme.

I am feeling excited as do Fred and Colleen that Medicine Dance continues to extend ‘her’ limbs into new and unchartered territory.

Medicine Dance for me is a practice of discovery and exploration. The invitation to ‘include my body’ and ‘notice how I feel inside my body’ within the context of moving with or without music allows and gives me permission to connect with an evolutionary process that continually informs and deepens my human experience and existence. Taking time to be with myself and others in this way supports my ability to uncover other ways of comprehending prescribed belief systems that can feel limiting and immovable. I notice I have choice, and as my trust ultimately grows of myself, so too does my connection to the wonder magic and love of our species, this world and beyond.